ABSTRACT

Scholarship about the concept of the conscience has languished in the past half century, although some recent works have sought to revive it. One recent attempt proposes that the key to reviving the concept is its secularisation, since this secularisation would make it less dogmatic and more useful to a wider audience. In this paper, I argue that this process already occurred in American collegiate moral education. Yet, when the moral conscience in America became separated from its religious roots and the functions inspired by those roots, it eventually lost its place in any general approach to collegiate moral education. The secularisation of the concept cut it off from the roots nourishing its earlier multi-faceted religious understanding and led it not to be reutilised for a broader audience but to it being replaced by a secularised form of reason.

摘要

在过去的半个世纪里，关于良心概念的学术研究已经萎靡不振，尽管最近的一些作品试图重振它。最近的一项尝试提出，复兴这个概念的关键是它的世俗化，因为这种世俗化会使其不那么教条，对更广泛的受众更有用。在本文中，我认为这个过程已经发生在美国的大学德育中。然而，当美国的道德良知与其宗教根源以及受这些根源启发的功能分离时，它最终在大学道德教育的任何一般方法中失去了地位。